Diamond mining company “dramatically” cuts viruses and spam with Mimecast

About Rockwell Diamonds

Rockwell Diamonds is a listed mid-tier diamond mining company which operates three mines in South Africa and shareholders across North America, Europe, the Middle and Far East and South Africa. As a listed entity, the company has stringent compliance and governance requirements which extend into the way it manage its ICT infrastructure.

It is the company’s aim to offer solid value to its shareholders by bringing together its modern plant equipment, exploration, geology and processing expertise and capacity with its low-risk African operations (existing mines with sustainable production and growth potential).

The challenge

Rockwell’s top pressures concerning email management at the time of the engagement were compliance-driven archiving, spam blocking and virus prevention.

Having used Microsoft Exchange Server which does not have specialised spam and virus protection modules, improving the company’s susceptibility to infections and junkmail was prioritized as an area for improvement. The decision to migrate was catalyzed by an incident of downtime which put the company’s reputation at risk while communications with its shareholders and other important stakeholder groups was interrupted, says Kevin Jansen van Rensburg, ICT manager.

Rockwell’s storage and archival solution needed upgrading and customization in order to exceed its ICT governance requirements to ensure that it manages the risk of data loss in the event of computer loss or theft, he said.

Finally, the company was looking to expand its operations, and so the need was identified for a secure, scalable email management system that provided protection against system intrusion, offered robust archiving and left room for user and data growth.

It was to form the backbone of Rockwell’s communications, Jansen van Rensburg says given the remoteness of the group’s three sites, it doesn’t have the luxury of ‘dropping by’ at a colleague’s office to expedite communications. And considering the high cost of frequent phone calls, email was quite simply the only alternative.

In addition, Rockwell bore (and continues to bear) a considerable compliance burden, with onerous archiving obligations imposed by laws including the US-based Sarbanes-Oxley, thanks to multiple listings including the JSE, Toronto Stock Exchange and the US-based Over-the-Counter Bulletin Board. Hence it also required archiving.

The solution

It didn’t have to look too widely for a solution. Having rented space on the Exchange Server of Randgold Resources for a time and witnessed that company’s beneficial use of Mimecast off-site email management, it decided to acquire Mimecast for itself.

The company chose Mimecast’s Email Security and Email Archiving solutions, available as standalone components or as part of the Mimecast Unified Email Management solution.

“It took care of all our needs and issues in one go,” says Jansen van Rensburg. “Mimecast Email Archiving stores all in - and outbound email in triplicate, offsite archives for a default 10 years. And Mimecast Email Security has an unequalled reputation for cleaning viruses and spam in the cloud.”

The benefits

The Mimecast installation, consisting of a light-weight client-side user application, an extra mail server as backup (virtual),and configuration to the onsite Exchange Server (or any other email server), took mere minutes.

The most immediate benefits of Mimecast’s cloud delivery model have been to lessen the onsite server load and reduce storage costs. Training was further minimal, involving only the ICT manager and a technician. “Within minutes we had total freedom from the spam and virus that had troubled us,” says Jansen van Rensburg.

The system offers the following additional benefits:

Virus infections and spam have been cut “dramatically”.

The solution offers elastic capacity on demand.

Instant and unaided user access to all emails ever sent or received.

Central administrator control over retention policies.

Reduced operating model, versus expensive up front acquisition cost.

“If we had to purchase all this functionality ourselves, it would be much more,” says Jansen van Rensburg.

“Mimecast South Africa has been enormously forthcoming the few times where its support has been needed.” concludes Jansen van Rensburg.